Book review: David Petraeus' war of ideas

‘The Insurgents’ tells how the general and other academics fought to change military tactics in Iraq

FILE - In this Monday, July 18, 2011 file photo, Gen. David Petraeus, then top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, salutes during a changing of command ceremony from Petraeus to Gen. John Allen in Kabul, Afghanistan. Nearly two dozen generals have commanded troops from the United States and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, since the American invasion in late 2001. While some analysts say fresh eyes are important, others wonder if the revolving door command has hurt U.S. continuity with critical Afghan partners. (AP Photo/Musadeq, File Sadeq)
— AP

FILE - In this Monday, July 18, 2011 file photo, Gen. David Petraeus, then top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, salutes during a changing of command ceremony from Petraeus to Gen. John Allen in Kabul, Afghanistan. Nearly two dozen generals have commanded troops from the United States and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, since the American invasion in late 2001. While some analysts say fresh eyes are important, others wonder if the revolving door command has hurt U.S. continuity with critical Afghan partners. (AP Photo/Musadeq, File Sadeq)
/ AP

If you were hoping for a biography of former Army Gen. David Petraeus — an important and interesting figure even before the extramarital affair scandal that resulted in his resignation as CIA director in November — Slate columnist Fred Kaplan’s latest book isn’t it.

But “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War” is probably more important, idea-wise, than a biography might have been.

The book is a description of how various military academics, with Petraeus possibly in the lead, arrived at the same unpopular conclusion in the mid-2000s: That counterinsurgency, or small-war, tactics were needed to avoid losing the Iraq War.

Why unpopular? Kaplan depicts then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon as a toxic place where no one was allowed to challenge the Bush administration’s view that Iraq could be invaded quickly and then handed back to its citizens to govern.

When that idea fell apart after the 2003 invasion, Rumsfeld famously didn’t want to hear the word “insurgent” — a description of those resisting the new Iraqi government with guerrilla attacks.

The premise of Kaplan’s book is that Petraeus and his intellectual compatriots fought their own guerrilla war of ideas to steer the U.S. military toward a new Iraq strategy.

Kaplan calls this group of military thinkers COINdinistas, playing off the military shorthand for counterinsurgency, COIN.

What are counterinsurgency tactics? It’s the “clear-hold-build” strategy that the United States eventually adopted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply, it instructs U.S. troops to fight off guerrilla attackers and establish order in a village, making it safe for civilian authorities to enter and rebuild a working government.

That formula requires lots of American boots on the ground, which dictated the troop surges in Iraq and later in Afghanistan.

Petraeus got interested in these ideas during his college days at West Point. Meanwhile, most of the Army was fixated on how to fight the next major tank war in Europe.

The book does discuss Petraeus’ formative years — including how he met his wife, daughter of the West Point superintendent, and how friends and foes viewed that as an early sign of the intense young officer’s aspirations to greatness.

But Kaplan also devotes substantial ink to the lesser-known COINdinistas and how their thinking evolved. He is very thorough. Despite his clean, journalistic prose, the first few chapters feel like a book report on their early reading lists. If you are not a military wonk, the first 100 pages are a hard slog.

It’s noteworthy that Kaplan’s depiction of this fight of ideas is basically bloodless. He barely mentions the main reason for the Iraq War’s unpopularity — the grisly American body count.

I’m curious why he made that choice. It might have offered an interesting contrast to his portrayal of how Petraeus and his intellectual compatriots battled for change in military policy — largely a paperwork fight. They convened conferences, rewrote manuals and authored articles for small military journals.

“The Insurgents” doesn’t give us much insight into why Petraeus went so spectacularly off the rails last year, after being considered the most famous general of his generation and a possible presidential contender.

When the scandal broke, Kaplan rushed out a postscript. (In a Slate story, he also named Petraeus’ mistress as Paula Broadwell, the general’s biographer.)

His conclusion on Petraeus seems to be that the wily, wiry Army man worked his policy magic by forming a loose coalition of like-minded military scholars. Kaplan even calls it a “cabal.”

These people traveled the same rarefied paths: Ivy League grad school, Rhodes Scholarships, teaching tours at West Point. (By the way, who knew that brainy Army officers got such cushy assignments? Beats the corporate world.)

From Kaplan’s postscript:

“But, unlike other protégés, Broadwell didn’t merely admire Petraeus, she adored him—and Petraeus let her, to a degree that discomfited some of his aides. In Kabul, he gave her extraordinarily close access; they ran five-mile jogs at dawn together, traveled together, shared endless hours for months at a time. Petraeus had invented his own rules before, though strictly for military reasons. Now, after so many years of deployments, on a turf more primal, the allure proved overwhelming, the famous discipline broke down.”

Kaplan’s larger point about counterinsurgency policy may get lost in this hubbub about the scandal. But it’s probably the more important analysis.